Global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024 from 23% the year prior, with managers experiencing the largest drop. It comes as lost productivity costs the global economy $438 billion, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report.
The report noted that engagement has only fallen twice in the past 12 years, in 2020 and 2024. Last year’s two-point drop in engagement was equal to the decline during the year of COVID-19 lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders.
According to the report, the drop in manager engagement drove the global employee engagement decline.
Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%. Individual contributor engagement remained flat at 18%. No other worker category — male or female, young or old — experienced as significant a decline. However, two types of managers were particularly affected: Young (under 35) manager engagement fell by 5% while female manager engagement dropped by 7%.
Gallup stated in its report that if managers are disengaged, their teams are, too.
“When we consider the decline in both manager life evaluations and employee engagement, a deteriorating workplace environment is the common denominator,” the report noted. “As with engagement, the consequences are existential for a business. Manager burnout eventually leads to declining performance, increased absenteeism, and increased turnover, impacting the people they lead and the organisation itself.”
Gallup estimates that if the world’s workplace were fully engaged, USD 9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the global economy, the equivalent of 9% in global GDP.
Further research found that after five years of steady improvement, global employee life evaluations fell in 2023 and again in 2024, declining to 33%. Again, managers experienced the largest decrease in the percentage who rate their lives positively enough to be considered thriving, while individual contributors saw their life evaluations improve slightly.
Employee engagement reflects the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. To determine the percentage of engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged employees, Gallup uses a formula founded on extensive research about how engagement elements relate to various workplace outcome.
Wall Street extended its gains to a ninth straight day Friday, marking the stock market’s longest winning streak since 2004 and reclaiming the ground it lost since President Donald Trump escalated his trade war in early April.
The rally was spurred by a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market and resurgent hope for a ratcheting down in the U.S. trade showdown with China.
The S&P 500 climbed 1.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 1.4%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 1.5%.
The gains were broad. Roughly 90% of stocks and every sector in the S&P 500 advanced. Technology stocks were among the companies doing the heaviest lifting. Microsoft rose 2.3% and Nvidia rose 2.5%. Apple, however, fell 3.7% after the iPhone maker estimated that tariffs would cost it $900 million.
Banks and other financial companies also made solid gains. JPMorgan Chase rose 2.3% and Visa closed 1.5% higher.
Employers added 177,000 jobs in April. That marks a slowdown in hiring from March, but it was solidly better than economists anticipated. However, the latest job figures don’t yet reflect the effects on the economy of President Donald Trump’s across-the-board tariffs against America’s trading partners. Many of the more severe tariffs that were supposed to go into effect in April were delayed by three months, with the notable exception of tariffs against China.
“We’ve already seen how financial markets will react if the administration moves forward with their initial tariff plan, so unless they take a different tack in July when the 90-day pause expires, we will see market action similar to the first week of April,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Northlight Asset Management.
The S&P 500 slumped 9.1% during the first week of April as Trump announced a major escalation of his trade war with more tariffs. The market has now clawed back its losses since then, helped by a string of resilient earnings reports from U.S. companies, hopes for de-escalation of trade tensions with China, and expectations that the Federal Reserve will still be able to cut rates a few times this year.
The benchmark index is still down 3.3% so far this year, and 7.4% below the record it reached in February.
All told, the S&P 500 rose 82.53 points to 5,686.67. The Dow gained 564.47 points to 41,317.43, and the Nasdaq added 266.99 points to 17,977.73.
The job market is being closely watched for signs of stress amid trade war tensions. Strong employment has helped fuel solid consumer spending and economic growth over the last few years. Economists are now worried about the impact that taxes on imports will have on consumers and businesses, especially about how higher costs will hurt hiring and spending.
The economy is already showing signs of strain. The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.3% annual pace during the first quarter of the year. It was slowed by a surge in imports as businesses tried to get ahead of Trump’s tariffs.
The current round of tariffs and the on-again-off-again nature of Trump’s policy have overshadowed planning for businesses and households. Companies have been cutting and withdrawing financial forecasts because of the uncertainty over how much tariffs will cost them and how much they will squeeze consumers and sap spending.
Hopes remain that Trump will roll back some of his tariffs after negotiating trade deals with other countries. China has been a key target, with tariffs of 145%. Its Commerce Ministry said Beijing is evaluating overtures from the U.S. regarding the tariffs.
Investors had a relatively quiet day of earnings reports following a busy week. Exxon Mobil rose 0.4%, recovering from an early slide, after reporting its lowest first-quarter profit in years. Rival Chevron rose 1.6% after it also reported its smallest first-quarter profit in years.
Falling crude oil prices have weighed on the sector. Crude oil prices in the U.S. are down about 17% for the year. They fell below $60 per barrel this week, which is a level at which many producers can no longer turn a profit.
Block slumped 20.4% after reporting a sharp drop in first-quarter profit that fell short of analysts’ forecasts. The financial technology company behind Cash App cited a pullback in consumer spending on travel and other discretionary items as a key reason for the results.
Treasury yields rose in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.31% from 4.22% late Thursday.
📉 Gen Z’s Career Confidence Is Collapsing — And That Should Alarm Everyone According to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Confidence Index, the youngest generation in the labor force is feeling the least secure. 📌 Gen Z’s score dropped to +24 — the lowest of any generation. 📉 That’s a 7-point decline from last year. Millennials came in at +40, Gen X at +42, and Boomers at +44. It’s clear: confidence is falling across the board, but Gen Z is being hit the hardest. This trend isn’t just about job market stats. It’s about rising burnout, AI disruption, inflation, and a broader sense of instability. If we want a resilient and productive future workforce, we need to take this seriously: ✅ Upskilling. ✅ Career clarity. ✅ Mental health support. ✅ Honest leadership. Let’s stop pretending the system isn’t broken — and start fixing it. If you found this helpful, follow me for clear, honest breakdowns of what the data really means for your future.
Trade fears fueled a freight binge to kick off the year. It probably presages a nasty hangover. U.S. companies rushing to get ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariff barrage sent imports spiking in the first three months of 2025, lifting a key cost measure for 20 global shipping routes, the Baltic Dry Index, by over 40% year-to-date, according to LSEG data. No matter what happens with trade policy, a pullback is inevitable.
The global scramble to get ahead of the highest U.S. trade levies in a century is a fillip to firms that can handle the complexity. A.P. Moller-Maersk (MAERSKb.CO), opens new tab, the world’s largest container carrier, said that it hasn’t yet cancelled a single trans-Pacific crossing this year. U.S. railroad traffic was up 5% year-over-year during the week ending April 26th, according to the Association of American Railroads, opens new tab, while routes that incorporate a mixture of rail, ships, and trucks saw volume climb 8%.
The Baltic Dry Index, a freight cost measure for 20 global routes, has risen to over 1,400 points, from around 1,000 to start the year, as tariff complexity and rush orders pull forward shipping orders.
Yet these look like increasingly lonely outliers as tariffs begin to bite. Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd (HLAG.DE), opens new tab, the globe’s fifth-biggest carrier, opens new tab, reported a 30% cancellation rate on China-to-U.S. cargo in April. Port of Los Angeles executive director Gene Seroka expects volume from China to plunge 35% next week.
All of this will eventually feed through to the onshore business of moving goods from point A to point B. Some 3.5 million people are truck drivers, says the American Trucking Associations, opens a new tab, more than all U.S. firefighters, police, and correctional officers combined. A slowdown threatens not just the industry but the broader economy.
Flatbed truck delivery rates slipped for the first time this year, opening a new tab during the week ending April 18th, according to industry research outfits Truckstop and FTR. Shares of 101-year-old hauler Saia plunged 31% after badly missing analyst expectations for its first-quarter results. Finance chief Matthew Batteh said April shipment growth has turned negative compared with last year, following a 3% bump in March.
Any relief on levies may be too late to avoid some pain. United Parcel Service announced 20,000 job cuts, as it sheds some 50% of shipping volume from its biggest customer, Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said both merchants and his team moved to stockpile inventories, implying a downshift to come.
Moreover, the pandemic showed just how difficult a sudden stop-start is to manage. As activity resumed following lockdowns, warehouses delayed container pickups, jamming terminals. Investors are already getting the message, with the Dow Jones Transportation Average index down 14% this year. At this point, there may not be a course left to chart around the impact.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on Friday proposed a $163 billion cut to the federal budget that would sharply reduce spending on education, housing, and medical research next year, while increasing outlays for defense and border security.
The administration said the proposed budget would raise homeland security spending by nearly 65% from 2025 enacted levels, as Trump cracks down on illegal immigration.
Non-defense discretionary spending, which excludes the massive Social Security and Medicare programs and rising interest payments on the nation's debt, would be cut by 23% to the lowest level since 2017, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
The proposal would cleave more than $2 billion from the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service and would slice the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by more than 40%.
Trump's first budget since reclaiming office seeks to make good on his promises to boost spending on border security while slashing the federal bureaucracy. Congressional Democrats blasted the domestic spending cuts as too severe, and some Republicans called for boosting spending on defense and other areas.
"At this critical moment, we need a historic budget -- one that ends the funding of our decline, puts Americans first, and delivers unprecedented support to our military and homeland security," OMB Director Russ Vought said in the statement.
Vought, while at the Heritage Foundation, was an architect of Project 2025, a roadmap for scaling back the reach of the federal government. Trump disavowed that effort during the campaign, but once in office, he made Vought his budget czar.
The federal government has a growing $36 trillion debt pile, and some fiscal conservatives and budget experts worry Trump's proposal to extend his 2017 tax cuts will add to it.
The so-called skinny budget is an outline of administration priorities that will give Republican appropriators in Congress a blueprint to begin crafting spending bills.
Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins, the chamber's top appropriator, reacted coolly.
"This request has come to Congress late, and key details still remain outstanding. Based on my initial review, however, I have serious objections," Collins, of Maine, said. She cited concerns that defense spending was too low and worried about cuts to programs to help low-income Americans heat their homes.
"Ultimately, it is Congress that holds the power of the purse," Collins said.
STATE, EDUCATION HIT
The budget proposal calls for a $50 billion cut at the State Department as it absorbs the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The proposal calls for a $2.49 billion cut to the IRS, which one White House budget official said would end former President Joe Biden's "weaponization of IRS enforcement." Nonpartisan analysts say cuts to the IRS can hurt tax collection and thus add to the deficit.
OMB also called for sharp cuts at NASA's moon program and to federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as Reuters reported was expected.
The proposal furthers Trump's promise to shutter or greatly diminish the Department of Education, slashing about 15% of the department's budget.
Funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees housing assistance programs, would be cut almost in half.
"Donald Trump’s days of pretending to be a populist are over," said top U.S. Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York in a statement. "His policies are nothing short of an all-out assault on hardworking Americans."
The administration says the budget would boost discretionary defense spending by 13%, but Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said defense spending would remain at levels set under Trump's Democratic predecessor, Biden, which amounts to a cut due to inflation.
Officials said the White House believes Republicans in Congress will add more defense spending as part of the process of passing Trump's tax-cut bill on a party-line vote, bypassing the Senate filibuster.
"We think the Hill will be with us on this as we get to talk to more of them along the way," Vought said in an interview with Fox Business.
Outlays in fiscal 2024, which ended October 1, amounted to $6.8 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Lawmakers often make substantial changes in the White House budget request, but Trump commands unusual sway over Republican lawmakers and may get much of what he seeks.
Republicans in Congress hope to enact the tax cut bill by July 4 and are working to bridge internal divisions over proposed cuts in federal spending to pay for it. They may have to factor in growing stress in the U.S. economy from Trump's tariff hikes that are upending global trade.
The White House budget calls for an additional $500 million in discretionary spending to bolster border security and aid Trump's push for mass deportations, as well as $766 million to procure border security technology funding, and funding to maintain 22,000 border patrol agents and hire additional Customs and Border Protection officers.
The administration is still working to put together a separate rescission package to codify cuts already made by the Department of Government Efficiency, a budget official said.
U.S. job growth slowed marginally in April, but the outlook for the labor market is increasingly darkening as President Donald Trump's aggressive tariff policy heightens economic uncertainty.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 177,000 jobs last month after rising by a downwardly revised 185,000 in March, the Labor Department said on Friday.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 130,000 jobs added last month after a previously reported 228,000 advance in March.
The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%. It is too early for the labor market to show the impact of Trump's on-and-off-again tariffs policy. Amid the uncertainty, the Federal Reserve is expected to keep benchmark interest rates in the 4.25%-4.50% range next week. Economists expect companies will reduce hours before resorting to mass layoffs.
MARKET REACTION:
STOCKS: S&P 500 E-minis added to gains and were up 0.85%, pointing to a solid open on Wall Street
BONDS: The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes rose to 3.2676%, and the two-year note yield rose to 3.744%. FOREX: The dollar index pared a loss and was 0.30% lower, while the euro extended 0.27% higher
COMMENTS:
MARK MALEK, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, SIEBERT NXT, NEW YORK
“We are expecting a slow decline in non-farm payroll growth, and while it's not positive by any means, it's better than could've been expected. I think there were whisper numbers around there that were significantly less and I think people were somewhat braced for a bigger potential drop. The unemployment rate remains the sam,e which was pretty positive.”
ROBERT PAVLIK, SENIOR PORTFOLIO MANAGER, DAKOTA WEALTH, FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT
"The economy isn't collapsing as people were worried about. We came in better than expected, both on the nonfarm payrolls report itself, but then it didn't show any real increase to average hourly earnings, and so that came in a little bit lighter than expected. So that takes the concerns of wage pressures a little bit out of the picture."
"The market likes the news. There'll be some out there that will point to a lagging indicator, the fact that the Liberation Day sort of came and didn't necessarily get completely factored into nonfarm payrolls. But I really wouldn't worry too much about that yet. I would focus more on the positive aspect of this report -- the positivity that the US economy is continuing to move forward and still healthy enough, not gangbusters, but still healthy enough."
MARK MALEK, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, SIEBERT NXT, NEW YORK
“The numbers are holding up: so obviously the survey was worth 138,000, and we came in slightly higher, but last month was revised significantly downward. I think it just reflects what the consensus is expecting. We are expecting a slow decline in non-farm payroll growth, and while it's not positive by any means, it's better than could've been expected. I think there were whisper numbers around there that were significantly less, and I think people were somewhat braced for a bigger potential drop. The unemployment rate remains the same that was pretty positive.”
SAMEER SAMANA, HEAD OF GLOBAL EQUITIES AND REAL ASSETS, WELLS FARGO INVESTMENT INSTITUTE, CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA
"We've reached a steady state for the labor market. We went from too hot to kind of just right in terms of job growth, in terms of wage growth, in terms of the unemployment rate. So again, until something more meaningful changes concerning the supply or demand for labor, it’s fair to say that it’s going to just keep chugging along."
"Probably the big risk to the downside is that trade tensions flare up again. At least right now with the 90-day deal,y there's still some hope that things get worked out."
Consumers are still spending, and that's driving continued job growth. The number was better than expected for this time, but it was revised lower for the last time, so if you take the two of them together, it's basically kind of right in line. So, the labor market is almost acting exactly as expected. It’s just settling into normal."
"If anything, it probably reinforces the Fed's stance of being on hold for longer because continued steadiness in the labor market is what they're pointing to as the reason why it might take them some time to cut."
CHRIS ZACCARELLI, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER FOR NORTHLIGHT ASSET MANAGEMENT IN CHARLOTTE (by email)
"Markets breathed a sigh of relief this morning as the jobs data came in better than expected. While recession fears are still simmering on the back burner, the buy-the-dip dynamic can continue, at least until the tariff pause runs out. We’ve already seen how financial markets will react if the administration moves forward with its initial tariff plan, so unless they take a different tack in July when the 90-day pause expires, we will see market action similar to the first week of April.
"If adjustments can be made and the new approach is more nuanced, with exemptions for activity that leads to the administration’s ultimate goals and more reasonable tariff levels, then the real economy can re-adjust and markets will take it in stride, however, we aren’t out of the woods yet, because it’s unclear how much different the US trade approach will be in the second half of 2025 versus what we’ve seen year-to-date."
MELISSA BROWN, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF INVESTMENT DECISION RESEARCH, SIMCORP, NEW YORK
" This is good employment data, which suggests that the economy remains strong. The one thing it suggests is that, even though everybody has been so worried about stagflation, maybe we managed to continue to grow without growing so much that we ignite inflation.
I don't know if this is necessarily going to change anything (interest rate cut bets) because we're still looking at a strong economy at least for now. We could see these numbers go down as the impact of tariffs really starts to make its way through the economy, but it's not there yet."
PETER CARDILLO, CHIEF MARKET ECONOMIST, SPARTAN CAPITAL SECURITIES, NEW YORK
“This trend remains positive. Basically, (this report) indicates you know that the labor market is stable for now.”
“(March’s downward revision) makes this report even stronger.”
“Hourly wages are positive, you know, and that gives the Fed more time to assess the inflationary impact of tariffs.”
“The participation rate ticking up is probably not significant, and probably because total unemployment is still at 4.2%.”
“The bottom line is this was stronger than we expected, and that it probably means that the economy is still not in recession.”
“The takeaway is this report supports the Fed staying on course at next week's meeting,g and the Fed will likely continue to stay on hold.”
“So that puts the June meeting in question again.”
BRIAN JACOBSEN, CHIEF ECONOMIST, ANNEX WEALTH MANAGEMENT, MENOMONEE FALLS, WISCONSIN
"Employment is holding in there, but manufacturing is feeling the pinch. The diffusion index for manufacturing, related to how many industries are growing versus shrinking, has dropped to 42. It’s back to the muddy recessionary conditions for manufacturing. In April, there was a big jump in hours worked in retail and transportation as people made their last-ditch efforts to buy goods before prices adjusted."
LINDSAY ROSNER, HEAD OF MULTI-SECTOR FIXED INCOME INVESTING, GOLDMAN SACHS ASSET MANAGEMENT (emailed comments)
“Strong jobs data puts a spring in the Fed’s step. Despite an increasingly uncertain economic backdrop, the US labor market remained resilient in April, with employment surprising to the upside and the unemployment rate remaining steady. In the here and now, solid labor market data provides the Fed with scope for patience. With the forward-looking outlook having deteriorated, however, today’s data feels somewhat backward-looking, and the risks remain that a weakening economy could see the Fed resume its easing cycle later in the year.”
